Awards and Professional Activities:
The College Language Association Creative Scholarship Award for Sterling A. Brown: Building the Black Aesthetic Tradition (1986).

The James Madison University Faculty Women’s Caucus and Women’s Resource Network for Scholarship (1988), and the Outstanding Faculty Award, Virginia State Council of Higher Education.

Founder and Organizer of the Wintergreen Women Writers’ Collective.

Organizer and Director of the historic Furious Flower: A Revolution in African American Poetry conference that brought 35 renowned poets and critics to James Madison University in 1994. Two books and a video anthology were produced from that conference.

Organizer and Director, the second Furious Flower poetry conference, 2004

Video anthology, California Newsreel, September 2005

Recipient, JMU Provost’s Award for Distinguished Service and the JMU Alumni Distinguished Faculty Award

Inductee, International Literary Hall of Fame for Writers of African Descent, October 2005

Publications: 
Book
Sterling A. Brown: Building the Black Aesthetic Tradition (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985; reprinted Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1994)

Essays contained in
Wild Women in the Whirlwind: Afra-American culture and the contemporary literary renaissance, ed. Joanne M. Braxton and Andree Nicola McLaughlin (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990).

Southern Women Writers: The New Generation, ed. Tonette Bond Inge (Tuscaloosa : University of Alabama Press, 1990).          

Articles in The Dictionary of Literary Biography, The Zora Neale Hurston Forum, The Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing, The Langston Hughes Journal, Callaloo, The Oxford Companion to African American Literature, and Black Books Bulletin.